Why would I not used Databricks as my data mart?

Question

I'm trying to get my head around Databricks.

I've found documentation stepping through importing data from S3 or Azure Datalake, and then outputting into Azure Synapse Analytics or another Data Warehouse solution.

After a quick play, I've recognised that you can simply save a table in Databricks, access it using SQL, and even pull it into PowerBI as a source.

So my question: for a small Datamart (10 dims, 5 facts), why would I choose to pay for an additional database solution like Azure SQL, Synapse, RDS or other when I could simply leave the data in a table in Databricks and then access it directly from my reporting tool from there?

Thank you in advance.

Andy

Answer 1

Yes this is very much possible. Just to let you know that SQL Azure and Synapse may be a Microsoft offering but they are for different purpose, Synapse supports MPP and so it more big data implementation. Also its not only how many dimension and fact table you have, how much data you have, what kind of aggregation it has etc becomes decisive.